You proceed into the interior of the tower, looking upward to see that it stretches straight up into the clouds, which have somehow made their way into the building. There are circular metal walkways every ten feet up, with ladders between each floor. Along the walls of each floor, as far as you can see from your current vantage point, are wine racks, most cluttered full with bottles. You proceed up the ladder, onto the second floor and inspect the bottles more closely. They seem to be grouped together according to their vintage, with labels indicating they were produced this year. You climb up to the next floor, glancing around at these bottles to see they are slightly older. You keep climbing, with no particular destination in mind, but only to satisfy your curiosity at what you will find. Is it wine bottles all the way up? How far up does it go? You keep climbing and climbing, for what feels like hours, your arms and legs aching, when you suddenly find yourself surrounded by fog, the cloud layer. You stop off at that floor to rest, laying on your back. You turn and glance down at the massive drop below, with a stomach lurch and immediate sense of dizzy vertigo. You quickly focus on the wine bottles to steady yourself. These racks are mostly empty compared to the lower levels. You stand up and walk over to the nearest rack, pulling out a random bottle. It is shaped differently than the bottles from the first few floors, more narrow. There is no label, perhaps worn off by the droplets of condensation covering the glass. You wonder how sitting for so long at such an altitude might affect the flavor? Perhaps it would not taste like any ordinary wine at all... You look around for a bottle opener.
At one point back in 2013 I made a note of this album, Aura – Rain, wondering if it could be classified as dungeon synth. I decided it was of course, but didn't write anything more about it. I can't even remember how I found out about it. It is wistfully sad, but not in a bleak despondent way, but rather like a cleansing release of troubles, a comfortable hopeful melancholy. According to the Youtube description, most of the songs were made in the late 2000s, and there is something about the sound that very much reminds me of that time period, when I was first learning music production and how to use a DAW myself. It is raw and primitive in a way that feels authentic, like it was just the best the artist could do at the time, rather than intentionally made in a lofi style. There are a lot of odd idiosyncracies, like unbalanced mixing of the different synth layers, and inconsistent timing, but that only adds to the charm, and there is still a feeling of focused intent. It feels direct and honest, and so it is easy to get swept up in the misty contemplative atmospheres that I believe the artist intended to conjure.
There are many albums now that do these things well, and this album is not unique for its influence or innovation, unlike most of the albums I try to focus on with this blog. So why review this one? I wanted to discuss how music ages, and I think Aura – Rain is special in that way, at least for me. I listened to it once or twice when it was first released, then basically forgot about it until now, over a decade later. I did not take much notice of it when it was released, seeming like just someone's early attempts at music production, and I would not take much notice if it were released today. And yet, because the project ended with this album and seems to have been forgotten by everyone, it now resonates for me like a pure time capsule preserving the enthusiastic simplicity of dungeon synth in 2013. But there's also the wistfulness of wondering, what could have been had this project continued? Very fitting for the rainy melancholic theme. I find all of those elements come together to give it some sort inherent charged magic, some sort of mysterious essence or energy between the sparse simple notes, built up by the long years of unknown dormancy.
So many albums coming out these days do not get the attention they deserve, and so many seem inexplicable in our current era. I think if an album goes totally unnoticed the month it is released, and even if it is hidden away in complete obscurity for decades, it can become all the more resonant and powerful because of that. It is like all those obscure old 90s tapes that went totally unnoticed until the passage of time allowed people to see their limitations in a different way, as distinguishing traits of art from a certain time and place rather than just diminishing defects. So what will be the unique limitations of our current era in 2025 that we might be nostalgic about decades from now? It is a comforting thought that perhaps all the albums being sincerely made now have the potential to eventually become future classics, at least from some individual perspectives. Aura – Rain is such an album I believe, one that is greatly elevated by time and obscurity, and might continue to grow more interesting as the years pass.
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